Photography: Steve Carey

Stand a few minutes by the Selkirk Trestle – a wooden bridge over a waterway – and you’ll notice swarms of cyclists coming and going. The trestle links the Galloping Goose, a former rail line converted to a car-free bike and pedestrian trail, with Victoria. It wasn’t always this way.

In the early 1990s, the Galloping Goose was a mess. The 55-kilometre Sooke-to-Victoria trail was clogged with piles of garbage. Darren Marr and Patrick O’Connor of the Greater Victoria Cycling Coalition (GVCC) view the salvaging of the trestle and the Galloping Goose as an example of how advocacy work has succeeded in improving cycling infrastructure in Victoria.

“I moved to Victoria in ’91, and I remember cycling up where the bridges are now, and they’d removed some of the boards so people couldn’t cross. It was a mud track, a real mess,” said O’Connor, vice president and the longest serving GVCC board member. “And piece by piece, the GVCC worked with others on the different bridges. In 1996, we got the Selkirk Trestle and then the Switch Bridge. And it started to come together.”

After much cleaning, wrangling with governments and legal issues, the Trestle became part of the Galloping Goose. Watching the thousands of cyclists coming across each day, it truly is a testament to the work the GVCC has done since it was founded in 1991.

With more than 300 members, the GVCC is the largest cycling advocacy group in Victoria. The group has successfully lobbied for bike lanes on some major routes, more bike parking, as well as racks on buses and lockers at transit exchanges. The nine directors put in countless hours, as do dedicated volunteers who help make the GVCC projects a reality. And the group continues to push.

“We do need more bike lanes. Bike lanes on Blanshard Street, extending from the arena through downtown to Beacon Hill Park,” said Marr, GVCC president. “We need more bike parking downtown. We had a lot of bike parking removed when the city switched to a different metered parking system. We also need to have more streets designated as cycle-friendly streets.”

Projects such as Velo Victoria, a bike culture festival, and Cycle Therapy, the GVCC newsletter, build a sense of community and GVCC’s involvement in the creation of trails, such as the 29-kilometre Lochside Trail, creates much needed infrastructure.

The GVCC’s main project now is safety on the Johnson Street Bridge, which connects the Galloping Goose with downtown Victoria. The 1924 bridge has a limited number of approaches, none of them particularly safe: a section of railway with a narrow path means cyclists must dismount, while others risk the ride across, disregarding posted rules. Or, one can merge into traffic, then onto a slippery-when-wet metal bridge deck and hope not to be swiped by a passing car.

The Victoria city council decided to replace the bridge, but a successful citizen-based counter-approval process has left it in limbo, with no repair/refurbish/replace timeline. With any option, Marr said cyclists, cars and pedestrians should be separated, and the approaches should consider cyclists, even if it means removing the railway tracks and making it a cycling-only section. This would encourage more people to cycle into downtown, he said.